Recommended Reading: This letter from The Paris Review’s Paris editor Antonin Baudry touches on everything from the surprising post-attack popularity of A Moveable Feast to Michel Houellebecq’stroublesome op-ed in the New York Times.

We submit that beginning a love story with the lede “I never intended to get a tortoise” pretty much guarantees that the reader will read to the end. In Sunday's New York Times Style section, Caroline Leavittputs our theory to the test. (If you like her essay, you might want to pre-order her new novel.)

After the Times Magazine published their interview with Roxane Gay -- in which the Bad Feminist author and Year in Reading alum delves into the title of her latest book and talks about her love of Sweet Valley High -- the crew at McSweeney’s dug up a humor piece the author published in 2010. If you can read the title without laughing, you are more stoic than I am: “I Am Going to Cook a Quiche in My Easy-Bake Oven and You Are Going to Like It.”